


Making Whole Each Winter Evening

by Attic_Nights



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Cannibalism, Canon Style General Pretentiousness, Canon-Typical Violence, Lithuanian mythology, M/M, Magic and Magical Beasts are Known, Oddly Canon Compliant, Time Travel, Wendigo Will Graham, Will's the helpful monster under Hannibal's bed, feat. The Eternal Winter that is the Show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 15:19:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5502614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Attic_Nights/pseuds/Attic_Nights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will's Ravenstag casually spends random winter nights hanging out with Hannibal. Alternatively, a fairytale about becoming whole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making Whole Each Winter Evening

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jhjuarez13](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=jhjuarez13).



> I realize this is probably very different to what you imagined… hope it’s still okay! I also realize you probably didn't mean Wendigo!Will literally but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ And apologies regarding Matthew Brown – he’s not necessarily a favorite of mine, so I hope you forgive me for his role in this fic.
> 
> _For the prompts: Any Hannibal/Will AU, Murder husbands, Hannibal dominating Will, Will transforming into Wendigo_
> 
> Hover text has been provided for, but not limited to, mythology info - all of which has been sourced from that most genuine of sources Wikipedia (may it live beyond us all. amen.) Just hover your mouse over a word like "Aitvaras"  and it'll pop up. Unfortunately, I don't think it works on mobile yet :(

Because it is antlered and immense, it’s gratifying it’s him and not Mischa who spies it. At first, he sees it as he sees snow flurries. Or, more like smoke, only blacker. It is watchful, however.

Away on his left, over a snowy bluff, dancing torches illuminate the low, spindly branches of black alder, and the respective shouts of the search party ricochet in the woodland valley. He breathes in the lingering scent of lavender, itching to continue.

“Hello,” he calls to it, unafraid. “I am Hannibal.”

He thinks it might be a forest spirit or god. His gut tells him that though its eyes glow like two bloody pinpricks in the cool night air, it is not _Baubas_ , the boogeyman. Baubas is evil by choice – but this, whatever this beast is, is no more evil than the shadows thrown by the moon, or the smoke coughed out by fire. It stands. It just is.

The beast steps forward, its pelt ruffling strangely. Careful of the pointed tines, which branch outward and upward like a naked, knotted crown of birch, he steps towards the dark creature with his small hand outstretched. Open.

He touches its nose and gets the impression of silky ash before the creature flinches backward. It stares at him for long moments, the air warm in their little bubble of world, and it blinks quickly. Curious, even.

It doesn’t flinch a second time.

He runs his hands along its chest and discovers soft feathers instead of a stag’s pelt, black as a raven’s. It kneels for him, red eyes watchful but crown thankfully still, and lets him clamber on its back.

His numb hands slip on the inky feathers. He guides it using his leg as he would a horse, left and right as the lavender scent trail curls around the piebald trunks of birch. They make good pace, the stag loping through the twiggy undergrowth and thick snowdrifts with serpentine ease.

Beside a frozen swamp, a Laumė cradles a sleeping Mischa to her stony breast. At the sight of Hannibal on his raven-feathered stag, she scampers backward on her clawed feet. One pale eye blinks up at them and her arm tightens protectively around his sister. Her fur, as blue as the daytime, ruffles indignantly. But she screams in terror when Hannibal’s beast tilts its antlers towards her. Seeking to mollify, Hannibal pleads with the fae to let his sister go, which she does, carefully lowering her to the icy ground. The Ravenstag grunts and the Laumė scuttles away into the night.

Mischa falls straight through the beast as if it is made of air. The beast blinks sadly, and Hannibal frowns. Carefully, he adjusts his grip on her; though he is strong for his age her tiny body is heavy. The Beast understands and crouches low enough for him to swing a leg over.

The castle gates loom before the trio when a shotgun rings out in the quiet night air. Mischa begins to bawl, terrified by the noise, and his own heart thumps in shock. Mother steps from the treeline, barrel smoking, and aims.

The second bullet rips under them, aimed for the Ravenstag’s neck, and all Hannibal can hear is a high-pitched whine in the sudden silence. He braces them both, ready to crash forward into snow. Until he notices the beast hadn’t flinched at all, as if the bullet had passed through smoke. He dismounts and the beast blinks serenely down at him.

A slender, feathered leg steps forward, nose bowed as if to nuzzle Mischa. Hannibal jerks backward. A single golden hair catches on a coal-black tine. Severed from his head, it curls there, incongruously bright, and the monster makes as if to move again.

“My sister,” he tells it, and clarifies, “Mine.”

The Ravenstag tilts its immense head, its antlers easily melting through a winter-bare bush as if through snow. Its mouth opens wide, a cavern as black as night, and though it has no proper lips, it murmurs with an almost human voice.

“Mine,” it enunciates carefully, thick around Hannibal’s Lithuanian. And repeats it again in a low, rich growl –

_“Mine.”_

 

* * *

 

Thankfully, the Ravenstag doesn’t take umbrage at being shot at. At nightfall, it occasionally waits in the snow piled outside his bedroom window, immune to rocks, flame and iron. At one point, it lopes into the kitchens, much to the terror of the staff, just to chase a rooster from the fireside. Outside in the wan moonlight, the rooster pops and cracks, metamorphosing into a small dragon; the Aitvaras roars, but the Ravenstag is calm, black, and terrible.

Hannibal teaches the Ravenstag Lithuanian. It teaches him English, and then together they learn Italian. He shows it a cheery postcard from Uncle Robertas.

“We’ll go there, one day,” he tells it, tracing the Ponte Vecchio with the very tip of his index finger.

“Hmm, I’d like to,” drawls the beast, casual in its usual penchant for soft slang. “But I can’t.”

“Is it for the same reason that nothing else can touch you?”

“I’m not really here,” it bites out, its voice suddenly cold like a flurry of frozen blood.

“Yes you are.”

“I only appear to be, little brat,” it adds more fondly, kissing his cheek with an ashen nose.

Hannibal crosses his arms and sprawls out his growing legs. The Ravenstag huffs with something that could be a laugh.

“You could be older than me,” it muses, being contrary in its rough, sly manner, “but you’re still a  chu chut, kid.” 

Hannibal rests against the feathered belly, which is warm as a freshly slaughtered pig. Eventually the beast sighs, waking him from his half-slumber.

“Do I cast a shadow?”

“No,” he answers, but he doesn’t think it needs to when it already looks like a shadow.

“Then I am not… here.”

“Am I here?” he wonders loftily, gazing up at the stars and imagining the two brightest, reddest pinpricks are God’s eyes.

The beast hesitates. “I think so. But all I see of you is shadow and smoke. Maybe I’d see you if I were whole.”

Hannibal falls asleep before dawn with a strange warmth blossoming deep in his chest.

 

* * *

 

Mischa clutches his hand tightly as they run through the moonless forest, both stifling cries and sobs as branches snag cruelly on their skin and clothes. The snow flurries bite his toes and nose, and if he’s cold, Mischa must be colder. Her face is thin and wan, her baby fatness all but edged away. He pushes them onwards but they’re slowing, limbs shaking and cut with blood. He trips over a rock hidden in a snowdrift, slicing his knee open, and she pauses, reaching out to him.

He leaps unsteadily to his feet and urges them forward. And stops, staring straight ahead. The Ravenstag swirls into existence, black smoke twining into wiry legs and a thick barrel chest, snow shimmering into raven feathers.

Mischa screams and only his shocked grip stops her from dashing away in a newfound burst of life.

“Why are you here?” he demands.

“Good question, aside from the fact that I’m not,” reminds the beast, and it looks weary. “Absolutely no clue, little one.”

He swallows thickly, a hundred thousand questions and accusations on the tip of his dehydrated tongue. But they can wait. Squeezing Mischa's hand, he croaks out a desperate, “Find us shelter.”

He peers out the window of an old cabin slouched deep in the black heart of the woods. The sky has cleared in the short time since arriving, and two bright pinpricks stare down from the heavens. It doesn’t reassure him like it ought to.

“God’s watching,” he snarls.

The monster nods in understanding. “God and Time are stranger beasts than even you and I.”

Fear muddles and confuses his recall when he sets tentative wards around the door and windows. The beast relaxes him by stepping inside his mind and showing him the way to construct a mind palace: memories for the foundations, truths for bricks and hope for mortar. The outside of his castle looms in his mind, just a shell, and together they ward it while Mischa chews the handful of raw grain abandoned by a scared-off Jievaras. He’s grateful when the Ravenstag chases away the very bad men from the cabin, but as the night wears on the monster starts to fade.

“Don’t go,” he pleads, Mischa’s sleeping body a dead weight in his arms. She’s still so cold, so small, despite the moth-eaten blankets and the hearth that glows orange on her golden curls. She’s surviving, but if the men came back? She smells hungry, earthy lavender overlaid with a frosty sickness.

“I don’t want to go,” the beast reassures him, the sun bleeding violet into the black horizon behind it. “But what I want and what’ll happen are two different things. There’s a beast inside me… he’ll wake.”

“You’re already a beast,” Hannibal tells it, confused.

“Yeah. But while I’m aware I am a beast, the other is not, and that makes him… all the more dangerous.”

“You‘re not whole.”

“No.”

He looks at his sister and feels a gut-wrenching tug. “Alone, neither am I.”

 

* * *

 

“Chu chut?” it teases, amused recognition twitching its velvet nose. “Or should that be Stripling?”

Hannibal lowers his butcher’s knife. “Please. Speak English or Italian.”

The Ravenstag bows apologetically and nuzzles the knife from his hand. It falls to the forest floor with a dull thud.

“Was she part of you?” it asks in English.

“She always will be.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you sorry? Or are you simply asking for forgiveness?”

It tilts its branching antlers slowly. “You blame me?”

“Everyone had their role that night. Even me. Even Mischa. To say otherwise is a fallacy.”

The monster is slow in its regard, seeming to take in all the ways Hannibal has changed. Eventually it scoffs. “Stoic as an oak.”

“Would you have preferred a weeping willow?”

“Your smile didn’t die with her, Hannibal. It was always yours. Sharp, dark… like the moon. Hers was the sun: bright and dry.”

Hannibal swallows wetly. “Where I was shadow she was light? How do you feel, telling me that?”

“You’re still too young.”

The Ravenstag clops closer, straining to peer at the crown of his head. Something causes it to reel back, blinking with wide red eyes.

“You ate them,” it gasps.

It steps forward thrice, wavering and unthinking. Its antlers branch like obsidian knives towards him. Hannibal bares his teeth in a snarl, ready for attack. But it doesn’t come. Instead, the beast nuzzles his chest, which beat so warmly it felt like a burnt, sunken forest.

“No no no. Don’t,” it whispers. “Don’t be like me.”

Hannibal licks his lips, still sticky from the honey rendered fat of his Geography tutor.

“Don't don't...” it implores, heaving in a shuddering breath, exhaling until the barest gasp remained. “Don't stop.”

 

* * *

 

“How many years has it been?”

He asks this while keeping his palms wide and non-confrontational. Open. Or it would be, if not for the weary tremor that droops his shoulders. Outside the lead-lined windows with their plush velvet drapes, snow blankets the ground and air in a dreadful gasp of white.

“Years? Time doesn’t exactly work the same for me.”

“I know,” he says, and it is as close to a genuine apology as he knows.

The Ravenstag bows its antlered crown, forcing Hannibal to step backwards to avoid the tines. In doing so, he scrapes loose-leaf PHD candidates down onto Johns Hopkins’ rich burgundy carpet. For once, its gaze is hard to pin down, fluttering between the shadows and the orange glow from the hearth.

Hannibal presses his head against feathered ribcage and wants to climb inside. Instead, he listens to it rise and fall, soft and warm, firm and shadow. As always, his clothes melt through the beast as if through smoke, until they are pressed feather to skin. For a moment, a moment long enough to fall asleep, he forgets he’s never going to be whole.

As always, the stag melts away with the rising dawn. He rouses with his cheek uncomfortably dimpled by carpet and sits alone for hours in his wrinkled suit. Unfortunately, his hair refuses to behave, a strange keepsake, with no combination of low-level Glamour or Magic managing to tame his feather-ruffled locks. When Alana and her leonine Familiar heave under the paperwork he gives them, both hungry for lunch, she takes one look at his head and curves a dark eyebrow.

“Are you having an affair?”

He doesn’t lie to her – at least, not this time, and only through omission. Upset shines pale in her sapphire eyes, though she hides it well overall. The truth tastes wholesome in his mouth, leaving a delicate and clean finish.

“Yes.”

 

* * *

 

Will Graham is a beautiful man. He glows with a sort of light that calls to his shadows, unwittingly beckoning him forth with intrigue. His smile is sharp in contrast to his dark curling hair, which looks as soft as raven feathers. When Jack introduces them, profiler to therapist, the man’s eyes don’t meet his own, but he doesn’t meet Jack’s eyes, nor later Abigail’s, either, so he doesn’t take it to heart. Instead, it makes him want to take the clever boy apart.

It’s enough for Hannibal to forgive the man for being pescatarian.

While Will eats salads and fish, he consumes pork, beef, chicken, duck. Lamb, venison, squab, kangaroo. Sadly, he finds that these days seafood is nearly the only meat that doesn’t turn to ash in his mouth.

Nearly.

He considers slipping blood into borscht, or stock into gravy. But, at first at least, Will has the most clever palate. Only when Will trembles with a latent fever does Hannibal dare for them to share a meal, slipping his preferred meat into both their plates. If anything, this makes Will tremble more, his fever brighter and sweeter, a sugared plum dancing within a burning pine forest.

Like Hannibal, his strength increases and his senses sharpen the more he eats human flesh, but still he bleeds. Will cuts him one day, and they are both shocked – Will for hurting, and Hannibal for smelling Will’s hunger. Hannibal sets his cut finger against Will’s lips, the empath’s blue eyes burning to maroon. With a start, Will unfreezes and runs off, leaving his onion half cut on the chopping board. Hannibal forgives him this rudeness, because before he left the kitchen, he saw his tongue dart out to swipe the crimson from his lips.

“I’m alone in that darkness,” Will confesses to him one session.

Hannibal’s heart beats strangely. Warmly.

“You’re not alone, Will,” he reassures. “I’m standing right beside you.”

He serves Will steak and kidney pie one winter evening on the crisp cusp of New Year. He’s sure Will doesn’t even notice. He’s fairly sure his own eyes slip maroon over _sanguinaccio dolce_ , but Will simply blinks and cleans his glasses. That night Will stays over for the first time, souped on mulled wine, poured into Hannibal’s pajamas, and spooned into Hannibal’s bed.

Hannibal doesn’t join him – he doesn’t need to. All he wants is for Will’s scent to wash over his pillows, marinate in his proffered nightclothes and provide him for tomorrow a slumber as wholesome as a roast dinner. He won’t need sleep tonight.

He’s aware he’s caging Will like a maiden in his own begotten fairytale, and the thought is tasty enough that he pauses in his movements. He sets the whetstone down on the benchtop, but not the cleaver.

He inhales. There is a new scent in the air, familiar, but different enough to Will’s to make him aware. The perimeter wards haven’t broken so… He twirls as a dark shape manifests behind him.

Startled, Hannibal automatically pitches the clever into its chest. It rears up, dark body towering heavily over him, its antlers gauging plaster from his ceiling, and strikes him with a gleaming black hoof. Hannibal reels back in pain, stumbling into the dining room, the inside of his mouth gushing iron.

“You think you could change me as I changed you?” it snarls.

With its hidden teeth, the Ravenstag pulls the knife from its sternum and steps on it. The steel blade crumbles to sand against the hardwood floor. Hannibal realizes he’s smelling it for the _first_ time – a factoid finally shaping after niggling unseen in his mind for so long. The absence of scent. Breathing in, he secures the woody, iron-rich musk, tempered with pine in the antler room of his memory palace.

“You are casting a shadow,” Hannibal notes around a mouthful of blood.

“I am here,” agrees the beast. “And I _see_ you.”

“What is your name?” he asks, already knowing the answer.

“I am a Wendigo, little one,” it spits, unharmed.

Hannibal wonders fondly, were he to remove a limb, if it would grow back.

The monster’s red eyes narrow and it bares its teeth, revealing them as black obsidian. “And I am Will Graham.”

“Then I have already changed you,” he points out, unsurprised.

Bowing slightly, Hannibal decants Chianti into a crystal glass. It pairs richly with his blood. Glancing up, he smoothly pulls out his chair.

“Sit,” he commands. The monster snarls. “Sit, please.”

The beast kneels heavily at his feet. Taking his place at the head of the table, he rakes his hand carefully through its razor tines, which are catching on his clothes, tearing through them as easily as claws through pastry. It’s so _solid._ In previous times, he had felt naked with the beast, clothes falling through the feathers like bullets through smoke, but now he was actively, if inadvertently, being bared. It shivers and cuts a white linen window to his abdomen.

The beast looks up at him, red eyes aflame in the cobalt blue dining room. He tightens his hands in the raven feathers, and the crimson gaze drops to his gut. The Wendigo breathes hot, damp air onto his trouser hems, and Hannibal watches a few feathers tumble to the floor.

“Let him out,” the monster implores. “Let _me_ out.”

 

* * *

 

Hannibal doesn’t need to, not in the end. His bound wrists sting from where they’d been artlessly spliced, and his blood pressure is low for the next few days. He gives this as his excuse when he stumbles faint in a forgotten wing of the BSHCI, words of revelation ringing in his ears.

Chilton is drunk with a sick sort of glee. It pushes bile into Hannibal’s throat when the man grips his shoulder confidentially – one crooked therapist to another. He keeps his breathing carefully measured and reclines against a disused IV machine.

“He’s _Other_ ,” the little man gushes, licking his lips.

Just from the _thought_ of killing him.

“Like Ms. Lounds?” he inquires, prudently misleading. It might sound plausible, even – however false in Will’s case, an unofficial inquiry might rule something of a _wayob_ about the both of them.

Chilton scoffs. “You know she’s only a Nagual _._ Entirely commonplace. No, this is something _rare_ , if not one of a kind.”

“And what of that nurse of yours, Matthew Brown?” he asks as they part. Though he despises the man’s style, he now knows he owes the man a present.

Perhaps Chilton is not the right pig to ask.

It’s kept under wraps – his cell is changed so even the guards can’t see him. Because then Chilton would have to transfer him, give him up to a different kind of zoo. Hannibal lets his interest appear as such that when the time comes Chilton implores him back to see the husk.

“Emerged like a baby. Screaming.” Chilton waggles his eyebrows. “Just two days. Beats Jesus, for sure. Though this is one religion I…”

Hannibal tunes him out and fingers the antlers carefully. Attached to the roots is pale dermis from when they shed. The tines aren’t sharp, and they are regretfully stunted; from how Chilton spoke, he had expected something more like the Ravenstag’s. Six rows of them; they must have sprouted like a fawn’s. Little twirling nubs, beautiful and blunt as Will’s teeth.

Will and the beast combine twice more, that he knows of. Imprisoned, Will rips them out – a sizable crown that entangled with his cell bars. But the last time sees him walking into Hannibal’s kitchen a free man, with his shirt catching strangely on his back, and a small thorny crown nestled in the feathers of his hair. If it weren’t for the gun at his head, Hannibal thinks he might have kissed him.

“I had preferred separation,” Will spits, his eyes flashing with pinpricks of red, and he leaves his therapist slack against the kitchen tiles.

A week later, Hannibal uses trauma shears to cut a black and red windowpane shirt from Will’s compliant skin. Rows of black nubs, even smaller than the ones he’d first shed, line the pale skin with unfurled buds, a pair to each vertebrae. Will is still throughout; his only accession of what’s happening is to shiver once he’s revealed to the cold air. Hannibal guides them to the fireside and encourages the empath to kneel by his feet. He speaks Italian, then Lithuanian, to Will’s carefully blank face.

Will shies away from Hannibal’s hands wandering anywhere near his head, where the dark locks are still crowned with a delicate tiara of antlers. Finally the Wendigo speaks.

“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I said I’d let you see me.”

“No?” he murmurs, pressing down on a nub on his L5 vertebrae, noting the reaction. “Dessert then?”

Will breathes out, a slow contrast to his gasp. “Please.”

 

* * *

 

Will’s antlers grow slowly, like the shadows cast by a winter moon, thick, black and twisting, but altogether just barely, until the day Will accidentally takes a chunk out of Hannibal’s office doorframe. He plasters it dressed in an old t-shirt, grumbling, his wayward tines now pleached closer to his head.

Like Will’s antlers, his beauty grows too. Hannibal is both aware and unaware of it, and it… _pays him a visit,_ so to speak. So when Will betrays him, the betrayal comes not only from him, but from his own treacherous heart. So thoroughly are they entwined that he guts Will only to find he’s gutted himself.

Bella said it herself, back in her deathbed, about forgiveness. “It’s like goodness. You can’t actually choose to do it,” the Goddess wheezes. “It simply happens to you.”

Will Happens.

Hannibal Happens.

Now they are entwined the days can be beautiful but no longer good.

Will raises a glass of _Château_ _Lafleur Pomerol 1979_ avec _babysitter négligente_ and pauses to catch his eyes before making his toast.

“May the bridges we burn light our way.”

Hannibal finds himself oddly warmed by that, strange emotions burning deep in his chest. He carelessly runs his free hand through Will’s sharp, coal-black hair and ignites him with a laugh.

One of the most beautiful things they do together is slay the Great Red Dragon. Will embraces him in their triumph, appearing to him almost human in the crisp moonlight, accepting him. Seeing him as he himself had been seen.

He realizes Will appears to him beautiful, and had so even before the Ravenstag had leapt into the empath’s pure, shining glow, to seamlessly marble him with whirling dark details. It’s a profound pull, a falling sensation, pitching to one side, literally. He smiles softly when, as if in slow motion, Will’s tines spiral free from his feathered hair as they hit water.

As much as they are able, it’s the closest thing to love.

 

* * *

 

“Could we survive separation?” Will asks one morning, pouring over the local rag for suitable marks. His ankles are wrapped around Hannibal’s, and he’s letting his coffee grow cold.

“I hope never to find out,” Hannibal confesses. “You’ve been with me so long.”

“Hmm,” says Will, and stops to circle something in crimson on the newspaper. “Likewise.”

Will looks up and cracks a smile at Hannibal’s face. Hannibal sips his coffee, closing his eyes to appreciate the taste better. Will snorts.

“At some point one of us needs to get milk, _love_.”

“Oh,” says Hannibal, and feels a smile creep onto his own face. “Not to worry. We’ll go together.”

And though they are now creatures of the Moon, when Will cannot provide the good light, Abigail’s eggshell eyes return in dreams to shine as bright and uncanny as the midday sun. Hannibal misses the Ravenstag some winter nights, so Will lightly drags the too-large glass of wine away from Hannibal's white knuckles. Will knows. Will always knows.

Hannibal's breath catches as he nuzzles the juncture of Will's shoulder, drinking in the familiar scent of pine and death.

"It's not gone. It's here now. It's always just here." Will takes his hand to place on his heart.

"Yes," he mutters into his empath's neck, "but unlike it, your Italian's deplorable."

Their hunting patterns change, little compromises to Hannibal’s lifestyle.

"I don't care for the rude," Will informs him, eyeing the severed head in the crisper with no little disdain.

Will proves himself an effective fisherman, his Caravaggio features a compelling and angelic lure. Since their fall, he appears at most fae-like by the sunlight. Like this, a real estate agent takes him in around Christmas, seeing him only as guileless and giving, right until the moment he’s not. When the sun bleeds dry, they share a fond grin and carve her open over the elderly bodies of her victims.

Later there’s a butcher, a baker, a butler and a blacksmith. Pedophile, dog fighter, kitten-drowner, and husband-beater, respectively. They eat well that Christmas.

They still regularly consume fish though, much to Hannibal’s chagrin.

When he asks one snowy night, Will merely taps his hip and retorts, “Don’t cook it so well, then.”

Hannibal frowns. Will might have well asked him to reheat McDonalds. When he tells him this, Will laughs long and loud. Eventually he stops enough to rest a consoling hand on his bare but rigid shoulder.

“Shut up and enjoy the compromise, Hannibal.”

 

* * *

 

The door opens soundlessly behind him, bringing with it the sweet scent of pine and blood. The warehouse slouches in the jungles of Detroit as a monument to failed humanity, and Will’s dress shoes ring out against its concrete floor to stand glorious beside him.

“Is it my birthday?” Will asks, and Hannibal doesn’t turn to look at his expression – not yet, at least.

Instead, he breathes deeply, pine and musk carrying warmer than the ozone of a winter storm.

“Do you like it?”

Will circles the bound nurse. “I feel I should be more surprised by the bow.”

“I thought we should tie up a loose end.”

Matthew Brown begins to stir, his left shoulder twitching and his throat convulsing enough to disturb the red ribbon wrapped around it.

“Did we honestly come back to America, chancing capture and The Chair, just so you could make a pun?” For a moment, Will’s eyes glimmer red as rubies from where he stands behind the tied man.

Grabbing a smooth-shaven chin, Hannibal raises the nurse’s head in demonstration. “You befriended him, once. I wanted to thank him for what he provided us.”

“He’s got honey glaze on his clavicle.”

“I may have started without you,” he admits lightly. “But what I said holds true. He’s yours to do as you please. I daresay he could use a friend.”

“Hawks…” Brown mumbles, tongue doubtlessly swollen from where he’d bitten it upon achieving unconsciousness earlier. His eyes flutter dully.

“Oh, he recognizes me.” Will sounds pleased. Hannibal drops the head, letting it hang. “He... I tried to kill you on this night, didn’t we? All those years ago. Y'know, a tiepin would've been a more appropriate anniversary present, Hannibal.”

"Noted." As if he would stop at a tiepin. As if hearing his thoughts, his empath barks out a laugh and shakes his head.

Will steps forward without taking any weapons from their open trunk, his pale hands open. His hips take on a hypnotic sway and he stops only to regard their prisoner through lowered lashes.

He turns enough to catch Hannibal’s eyes. Hannibal swallows.

“You are not whole without me and, somehow, the reverse is equally true.”

His hand plunges suddenly inside the man, blood spraying his ivory face. Matthew Brown’s eyes bug out in shock, before the whites of his eyes drop in surrender.

“I am not a hawk,” his empath snarls into the dying man’s ear, and rips out a still-beating heart.

Will turns to him slowly, holding the heart out to him in offer, his blue eyes blazing and his muzzle splattered red. From his crown his antlers blossom towards him like briar thickets, twisted and beautiful, and his hair shifts to feathers – actual feathers.

Hannibal feels his own body change, just on this side of painful. Gasping, he waits as Will’s hooves clip-clop on the desolate concrete, heart pounding in his palm, until they stand face to terrible face. He rests a coal-black hand on a porcelain neck.

“We’re just alike,” he breathes.

Their antlers entwine, and finally they are whole.


End file.
